If it would not inconvenience your Lordship

If it would not inconvenience your Lordship."The porter made it clear that it would not inconvenience him in the least. He held him there for a good moment, and it was obvious from the look which appeared on that sandy-haired individual's face, that he held him very hard indeed."Now pay attention to me, Sir Reverence."The porter was roughly escorted to the side of the coach."You comprennay-voo?" The stranger pointed with his cane to a large trunk on the roof "The blue item. His brows pushed down hard upon the eyes, and his cheeks shone as if life had scrubbed at him and rubbed until the very bones beneath his flesh had been burnished in the process His nose was large, hawkish, and high-bridged. His eyes were dark, inquiring, and yet there was a bruised, even belligerent quality which had kept his fellow passengers at their distance all through that long journey up from Dover.No sooner had they heard the coachman's Whoa-up than he had the door open and was out into the night without having said a single word.The first of the passengers to alight after him saw the stranger take the porter, a famously insolent individual, firmly by the shoulder blade. One privately imagined him a book-maker, another a gentleman farmer and a third, seeing the excellent quality of his waistcoat, imagined him an upper servant wearing his master's cast- off clothing.His face did not deny the possibility of any of these occupations; indeed he would have been a singular example of any one of them. It was, to be precise, six of the clock on the fifteenth of April in the year of 1837 that those hooded eyes looked out the window of the Dover coach and beheld, in the bright aura of gas light, a golden bull and an overgrown mouth opening to devour him - the sign of his inn, the Golden Ox.The Rocket (as his coach was aptly named) rattled in through the archway to the inn's yard and the passengers, who had hitherto found the stranger so taciturn, now noted the silver-capped cane - which had begun to tap the floor at Westminster Bridge - commence a veritable tattoo.He was a tall man in his forties, so big in the chest and broad in the shoulder that his fellows on the bench seat had felt the strain of his presence, but what his occupation was, or what he planned to do in London, they had not the least idea.

He is the author of six previous novels, including Illywhacker (shortlisted for the 1985 Booker Prize) and Oscar and Lucinda (winner of the 1988 Booker, and now being made into a film starring Ralph Fiennes).JACK MAGGSIT WAS a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in London. The ceremony will be screened live on Channel 4.PRIZE-FIGHTING: BOOKER QUOTES`A shitty choice.'Salman Rushdie's verdict on `Life and Times of Michael K' by J M Coetzee, which beat his novel `Shame' to the 1983 prize`Winning the Booker has had nil impact on my career, and your reputation sinks rapidly after winning the prize.'Anita Brookner, winner in 1984`I've got better things to do than swan around with the literati.'James Kelman, declining to attend the 1989 Booker dinner`I've won it and judged it and it's a lottery.'A S Byatt, winner in 1990`It will be a long time before the Booker recovers from this deep wound.'`Guardian' journalist James Wood, reacting to the 1993 shortlist`May God and literature forgive you.'Note from Vikram Seth's agent Giles Gordon to Lord Gowrie, after he failed to shortlist `A Suitable Boy'Which books should be on the Booker shortlist? Here, we publish the opening lines from an unofficial`IoS' selection, chosen by Rosie Boycott, and give you the chance to buy them all at a discount .PETER CAREYPeter Carey was born in 1943 in Australia and now lives in New York. On the other hand, they could equally send a shockwave through the literary world by simply discussing the books on the shortlist and picking the best one by amicable consensus.But Martyn Goff has a sinister glint in his eye. "I don't expect a quiet year," he says.! The winner of the Booker Prize is announced on 14 October. The real challenge is to surpass 1994, not just in awarding the prize to an innovative novelist but by providing as a backdrop the row to end all rows. "That was an, um, interesting year."This year then, the Booker judges, chaired by Gillian Beer, Professor of English at Cambridge, have an interesting task ahead of them in the run up to the Booker dinner on 14 October. And in 1992, Victoria Glendinning, later responsible for the comment that "old codgers" like Bayley should be banned from judging the Booker, had branded a fellow judge a "condescending bastard"."Ah, 1994..." sighs Goff, in the manner of a headmaster discussing an unruly pupil.

In 1983, when Salman Rushdie's novel Shame lost out to J M Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, Rushdie railed that the judges had made "a shitty choice". One of the judges, James Wood, a Guardian journalist who had branded the previous year's panel "middle-brow", managed to upset publishers early on by writing glowing newspaper reviews of books he was judging, giving the literary community an early lead on which contenders he personally favoured. Then he forgot to tell the rest of the panel that one of the novelists being considered for the shortlist, Claire Messud, was, in fact, his wife. Wood's fellow judge, Professor John Bayley, formerly the Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, joined the fray by declaring that modern fiction was "an ordeal" and called for more novels to provide "an escape from life" - novels a bit like those written by his wife, Iris Murdoch, who, as Wood unkindly pointed out, had failed to make the shortlist the previous year.Of course, bad language did not begin in the Kelman year. In the days before the runaway success of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Kelman's use of the Glaswegian dialect was deemed in itself a provocative act of incomprehensible Scottish separatism.Kelman won, but later on that evening, at the prize-giving dinner, Dr Julia Neuberger, a rabbi and one of the judges, broke the panel's traditional silence by using her own vernacular to publicly declare the book "crap".Even without controversial Kelman, 1994 would have been a memorable year for Booker squabbles. James Kelman, who had boycotted the prize in 1989 because he had "better things to do than swan around with the literati", had already dismayed some critics with his "relentless use of obscene language" (Daily Telegraph) in How Late It Was, How Late. However, he then ruined the dinner for some guests by declaring, heretically, in his speech that he had never managed to get "more than a few pages" into Proust and implying that no one else in the room had either.Then there was 1994, the "Kelman year", the Booker row of Booker rows.

Amis, it was felt, would never have made such an error.Still, some Booker judges never even make it to judgement day. In 1991 Nicholas Moseley abandoned the jury, complaining bitterly that the other judges were not interested in "novels of ideas". His fellow panelists retorted that he liked books "filled with cliches". Meanwhile, Malcolm Muggeridge, the author and commentator, found it impossible to get to the end of the 100 or so books on the list, sheepishly confessing to Goff that the "sex bits" were upsetting him. "How could you make me read all those disgusting books?" he complained.The late Richard Cobb, a former Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, at least made it through to the end of the judging.

Really, there was only two of them and they should have been outnumbered as the other three were in agreement, but such was the sheer force of their argument and passion that they won. David [Lodge] has told me he regrets it to this day, he feels he failed somehow by not saying, `It's two against three, Martin's on the list'."Front-of-house rows the same year were even more heated, with sneery Amis supporters finding fault with the Japanese-born winner's failure to grasp the English tradition of gentlemen passing port clockwise round a table rather than having it handed round by the butler. "Maggie and Helen felt that Amis treated women appallingly in the book. That is not to say they thought books which treated women badly couldn't be good, they simply felt that the author should make it clear he didn't favour or bless that sort of treatment. The issue that year was not who was on the shortlist, but who wasn't. David Lodge, the chair of judges, was desperate to shortlist Martin Amis for London Fields. The novelist Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, were determined Amis would have no place on the list."It was an incredible row," says Goff.